hp dl380 g9 panic hang on hpsa waiting for sda device

when our DL380 G9 panics and the crash kernel is loaded, it pauses for awhile on the hpsa.ko module load, spits out a few messages about waiting for new devices (said it found 1 new device), then hangs at:

waiting for 1 sda device.

we updated to the latest 4.1.12-94 kernel (which has the latest hpsa driver), updated lvm2 to the latest, and also updated kexec-tools to the latest. none of this made any difference.

we really need a solution (not only to capture vmcore dumps) but also to avoid having to use the ilo to power off hard to reset systems after a panic.